Tag Archives: hickenlooper

Fracking in Colorado proved deadly last week with the death of one and injuries of two other Halliburton workers at a frack job in Weld County. While a dramatic loss of life like this quickly made national headlines, Colorado residents near fracking sites continue to wonder whether they are being subject to less visible but just as deadly air and water pollution from fracking; pollution that will eventually strike in the form of cancer, birth defects, and respiratory disease.

Concerns like these have led to a spate of local initiatives, including several ballot measures, seeking to rein in fracking. Bolstered by findings that oil and gas development can pose immense risks to public health and safety, including recent findings that fracking operations release seven times more cancer-causing benzene emissions than previously estimated, these initiatives succeeded in putting communities first.

Yet while local communities have asserted their rights to defend their residents, they’ve also faced oil and gas industry lobbying and lawsuits aiming to turn back efforts at local control.

To fully defend local communities’ rights to protect themselves from the oil and gas industry, citizens in 2014 proposed a Colorado Right to Local Self-Government Amendment to the state constitution. Sensing a serious threat to their bottom line, however, the industry and Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper negotiated a deal that removed the amendment from the November ballot.

That deal resulted in the creation of a 21-person Oil and Gas Task Force, which was charged with recommending a set of statutory and regulatory changes to reduce the dangers of fracking to local communities. While welcomed by the oil and gas industry and the politicians they support, it has yet to be seen whether the Task Force can truly keep families and communities safe from fracking.

WildEarth Guardians decided that if the Task Force were truly to succeed, it needed a clear set of standards to measure progress. To that end, today we released a “Test for Success” for the Task Force. You can read the report here, but in a nutshell, we believe that any set of recommendations by the Task Force must include the four following elements:

• A right to know what chemicals frackers are using near communities and full disclosure from the oil and gas industry and state regulators,

• Safety triggers for pollution violations, which ensure that fracking is shut down when air, water, and other health standards are not being met,

• Three strikes and you are out for the oil and gas industry’s worst repeat bad actors, and

• The ability for local communities to step in when the state fails to enforce its own rules.

Overall, these recommendations are incredibly straightforward and are simply about putting public health and safety first. With reports underscoring the extreme risks of fracking, the recommendations are all the more reasonable.

“Any deal that does not protect our families and communities from fracking is not a compromise, but a failure.”

Check out the report for more details on these key principles, but more importantly provide your own input to the Task Force by emailing it to ogtaskforce@state.co.us. You also have a right to provide live public testimony at Task Force meetings. Their meeting schedule is here.

The bottom line is that if Governor Hickenlooper’s Task Force is to succeed, they need to hear from us. Whether they pass or fail is up to them, but unless we make clear our expectations, we can’t effectively grade their efforts.

For the sake of Colorado, we hope the Task Force lives up to these recommendations. However, if Governor Hickenlooper won’t defend basic principles such as the right to know and the need to empower local communities to enforce laws and regulations, it will clearly signal that citizen’ ballot initiatives need to be aggressively renewed.

Ultimately, this isn’t about whether fracking is good or bad, it’s about whether Colorado is going to be protected. The challenge is upon Governor Hickenlooper’s Task Force and we eagerly look forward to assessing whether or not they rise to the occasion.

It seemed reasonable and achievable when announced by former Colorado Governor Bill Ritter in 2007. For the state to do its part to confront climate change, greenhouse gas emissions had to be cut 20% by 2020 and 80% by 2050.

Unfortunately, meeting this modest goal is facing considerable hurdles in Colorado. What’s even more unfortunate is that those hurdles seem to be coming from our new Governor, John Hickenlooper, who appears poised to hand the fate of our energy future (or at least 2/3 of it) over to the fossil fuel industry.

Here’s the scoop. The Governor recently announced his goals for the Governor’s Energy Office. Among them:

To develop and deliver a plan for a balanced energy portfolio.
Through a stakeholder engagement process, we will work to develop an energy portfolio to promote sustainable economic development by advancing the State’s energy market and industry, folding the New Energy Economy into a Balanced Energy Portfolio of 1/3 coal, 1/3 natural gas, and 1/3 renewable energy.

In other words, Governor Hickenlooper intends to literally divvy up Colorado’s energy future like a pie, with equals parts going to coal, natural gas, and renewables.

It seems very Solomon-like, proposing to split the baby three ways like this. But remember, King Solomon never actually split the baby. He simply wanted to find a solution.

In this case, Hickenlooper’s idea of a “balanced” energy portfolio would be a disaster, both for advancing clean energy and meeting our greenhouse gas reduction targets. It would effectively cap renewable energy development and sustain coal and natural gas at levels that would prevent meaningful progress toward reducing greenhouse gases.

And coal-fired electricity generation is already the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in Colorado. The most recent inventory shows that by 2020, emissions are expected to reach 44.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. Roughly speaking, a 42% reduction in coal could mean an 18 million metric ton reduction in 2020 carbon dioxide levels.

Of course, that doesn’t consider the natural gas increase. The bump from 27 to 33% would amount to a 22% increase in gas. And while natural gas doesn’t release as much carbon dioxide as coal, by 2020 gas-fired electricity is still projected to release 5.8 tons of carbon dioxide. A 22% increase bumps that up to a little more than 7 million metric tons.

So in total, we’re looking at a reduction of possibly (and roughly) around 17 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in Colorado. Now, a reduction is great, but consider that to meet our goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 20% below 2005 levels by 2020, the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization recently reported in its Colorado Climate Scorecard that we need to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 54.6 million tons.

Obviously, 17 million is far short of the 54.6 million tons of greenhouse gases we need to cut just to meet our modest, near-term goal by 2020. It also means we have little hope of meeting our 80% greenhouse gas reduction goal by 2050.

Now admittedly, this is all back of the envelope calculation, but it raises serious questions over the wisdom of Governor Hickenlooper’s vision of a “balanced” energy plan. Clearly, when it comes to meeting our climate imperative, a 2/3 giveaway to the fossil fuel industry is about as imbalanced as it gets. It really underscores the fact that the metrics used to develop a “balanced” energy plan can’t be as simple as divvying up a pie. After all, if our goal is ultimately to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050, then a three-way split is probably the worst thing we could lock ourselves into.

Some will say Hickenlooper is just being pragmatic. Yet being pragmatic means coming up with real solutions that both address our need for a smooth transition to cleaner energy and our need to combat global warming. Sadly, Hickenlooper’s “pragmatism” in reality just seems to be another sign of political interference on behalf of the fossil fuel industry.

In addition to carbon pollution’s causal connection to climate change — with all the potentially devastating impacts on our global environment — we also face challenges in Colorado, where warmer winters have led to the bark beetle infestation of our forests. That’s one reason I was proud to attend the international conference on climate change in Copenhagen.

He usually laughs it off, making some comment like, “Somehow I generally manage to get both sides upset.” But he’s got it wrong. He’s not making both sides upset. He’s making policy calls that give the fossil fuel industry dominance over our energy portfolio at the expense of meeting our climate goals.

He can laugh off his pandering and flip-flops all he wants, but the metrics that matter are a stinging indictment.

I’d be OK if there were never any more coal….We have a problem with CO2. The science is done. It is clear that CO2 is not good.

And while it’s true that Kelly believes that we may be able to clean up coal at some point (which I have some differences with), his statements are certainly enlightening and on-point. I adamantly disagree with Dick Kelly’s leadership past at Xcel Energy, but I can’t deny that statements like this are exactly the kind of leadership we need right now.

Unfortunately, the only leadership Hickenlooper seems to be showing is his willingness to ensure Colorado never meets its 20% or its 80% greenhouse gas reduction target. The 2/3 giveaway to the fossil fuel industry is a catastrophe in the making for Colorado. Hickenlooper would do well to stick to science and common sense as he charts our energy future here in Colorado.

Hell, maybe he should tap Dick Kelly to head the Governor’s Energy Office.